The Tesla Legacy

Chapter 2

Vivian Torres hung on to the rock wall with every bit of strength in her chalk-dusted fingertips. She’d been mixing and matching holds all the way up, always trying to find something more difficult, and now she’d climbed herself into a spot she wouldn’t be able to get out of without falling off the wall. Her fingertips were screaming, but she wasn’t going to give up.

She ought to be safe. Her teenage sister, Lucy, stood below, belaying her. Lucy didn’t like to climb, but had taken and passed a belaying class because Vivian paid her twenty dollars for each visit to Brooklyn Boulders — an indoor climbing gym where she’d had to sign more waivers to touch the walls than she had to enter the military.

Easy money, but Lucy wasn’t earning it. Instead, she fiddled with her phone one-handed. If Vivian fell off the wall, Lucy would let her hit the mat like Humpty Dumpty. So, dropping wasn’t an option.

Vivian had to get out of this on her own. She hadn’t survived two tours in Afghanistan to kill herself falling off a fake climbing wall in New York City. No dignity there.

She blew a strand of black hair off her face and reached for a yellow handhold. She had to let one foot leave the wall, and her shoulders told her they were tired of her shenanigans. Her left hand slipped off the handhold, and the momentum knocked her off the one good foothold she’d been using. Pain shot down her right arm as it took her full weight.

Dangling by one arm, she had a good view of Lucy. The rope was slack in her brown hands, and Lucy studied the graffiti-covered front windows as if trying to read them from the inside.

“Yo!” Vivian shouted.

Lucy didn’t even flinch. White wires trailed out of her ears and down to the phone in her hand. She was wearing earbuds! Vivian had forbidden her to listen to music while belaying her. Back in the service, she had trusted her fellow soldiers with her life. Civilian life wasn’t like that.

She looked down at the wall below her, but she was just over a curve, and she couldn’t see far enough to find a safe place to put her legs or her arm. She blocked out the panic in her stomach and the pain in her hand. That was just her body. She could rise above that. She had scars on her back and a medal in her closet that would testify to it.

If she couldn’t use her eyes, she’d have to use her memory. She closed her eyes and visualized the wall below, replaying each potential handhold and foothold in her memory.

A red foothold scrolled by. She stopped the picture and studied it. If she swung toward it, her foot might reach. If she misjudged the hold’s position, she’d fall. But she’d fall in a couple seconds anyway, when her right hand lost its last bit of desperate strength.

She swung toward a foothold she couldn’t see, caught it with her toe, and pulled herself onto the wall. Her left hand found a new grip. She let go with her right hand and clenched and unclenched it, sending blood to her angry muscles. She hauled in a few deep breaths.

That wasn’t a mistake she could make on a real wall. That’d kill her. Next weekend she was going out to The Gunks with Dirk and a couple of friends, and she’d better get her head in the game by then. Outdoor walls were unforgiving.

But careful climbing wasn’t what the indoor wall was about. On the indoor wall, she didn’t allow herself to plan in advance. She went from one handhold to the hardest one she could see, training herself to react to the unexpected, getting stuck on purpose. Something that was a lot easier when she thought she had Lucy to back her up.

She reached for another handhold and pushed herself up with her legs. She wasn’t going to climb down before she reached the roof. Below her, Lucy started tapping her foot to the music.

Damn little sister. Vivian was taking back those twenty dollars as soon as her feet were on the ground.

Lucy looked up. “Your phone just beeped! It says you have a funeral to go to.”

Vivian touched the roof. “You’re damn lucky that it isn’t mine.”